Memantine therapy for Alzheimer disease in real-world practice: an observational study in a large representative sample of French patients.

Clinical trials have shown modest effects of memantine, an N-methyl-D aspartate receptor antagonist, in Alzheimer disease patients and memantine effectiveness in routine clinical practice needs to be established further. In 2003, memantine was recommended in France for Alzheimer disease patients with disease severity ranging from 15 to 3 on the mini-mental state examination at the first prescription. Our study aimed at describing memantine use in real-world practice in a cohort of 5283 memantine-treated patients (mean age: 80.1 y; women: 69.4%) randomly selected from the database of the national healthcare insurance, which covers 70% of the French elderly population. Mean follow-up after starting memantine prescription was 10.4 months (range: 1 to 20 mo). Patients were older and had a less severe cognitive impairment than patients included in the first controlled clinical trials. Memantine was prescribed with a cholinesterase inhibitor in 53.3% of cases. At 6 months, 26% of the patients had stopped memantine therapy (36% at 12 mo); conversely, patients who continued treatment were highly compliant. The 1-year mortality rate (12.5%) was similar for a comparative cohort of untreated demented patients and the memantine-treated ones. Approximately one-third of the memantine-treated patients did not strictly fit with the French summary of product characteristic recommendations for the first memantine prescription.